Bryan Fischer demands an evangelical coven to choose candidates for
president.
Tough luck, catholics, jews, muslims, Atheists, and others…
It says “We the People,” not “We the evangelical leaders”
Bryan Fischer
pulled no punches
in calling for a candidate for president chosen by a summit composed of religio-wingnut leaders. “It’s kind of like picking a pope,” said
Fischer.
No, it’s not, says the Constitution.
But Fischer is wrong: what he is proposing is really not kind of like, but exactly like.
And catholics beware: your opinion is not welcome. The electors will be protestants, leaders of the evangelical cabal, according to
Fischer.
I’m hoping that anti-family leaders, evangelical leaders…would come together, have a
summit meeting. That they would bring all these various candidates that
share our values, get ‘em in a room, and grill ‘em. Have the leaders of
the anti-family movement grill these guys one after another and probe
them and challenge them and test them and ask them really hard questions
about what they would do as president of the United States with this
issue or that issue. What would you do? Where would you stand? And get
some promises from these guys. And again, these are people of character
and integrity and I still think they need to be probed and pressed.
And then have these anti-family leaders come out of
this summit meeting, put their heads together, release all these guys,
let them go back to their states and wherever they go, and then put
their heads together and it’s kind of like picking a pope. You know it’s
kind of that kind of idea and you stay with it until you have the white
smoke coming out of the chimney until you pick one candidate that you
as a group of leaders would demand that the entire evangelical cabal gather behind.
This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
Rather the opposite, in fact. They wanted to keep religion out of
politics and politics out of religion, thus the prohibition against a
state religion found in the First Amendment.
History, I believe,
furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil
government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their
civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for
their own purposes.
“Fake christians have infiltrated the repugican cabal in
Texas and it’s like going to revival meetings when you go to our state
conventions.”
For Scarborough, this means “dog’s blessing our
state and why, I believe, Texas has become a model for other states,”
but Founders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson would have been
apoplectic, because,
as Madison wrote in 1774,
“Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption,
all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”
Mischievous projects. Like taking over the repugican cabal. Like establishing a state religion in violation of the
First Amendment.
Like pushing the idea that the First Amendment, which bans such
establishments, actually establishes christianity as a state religion.
Or is applicable only to christians. This is far from what the Founders
intended with the First Amendment.
Madison made clear in 1820:
Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect
… Equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be
presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country; as well as
best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among
citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony, and most favorable to the advancement of truth.
Experience witnesseth
that eccelsiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity
and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost
fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of christianity been on
trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and
indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both,
superstition, bigotry and persecution.
He sure called that one right. The religio-wingnuts
have given us “superstition, bigotry and persecution” galore. Bryan
Fischer has almost single-handedly been proof of that, but he has had
plenty of help from people like Gordon Klingenschmitt, David Barton,
Rick Scarborough, Tony Perkins, and others, not to mention numerous repugican politicians like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry,
Ted Cruz, and others.
But at least the religio-wingnuts' end-game all out
in the open now, and Americans can see finally – it is hoped – exactly
what these bigots have in store for America: an evangelical and
completely un-Constitutional theocracy, three branches of government
completely in thrall to religio-wingnuts touting a completely
unbiblical religion pretending to be christianity.
For mixing cult and state has done to religion
exactly what the Founders warned: it has corrupted both to the point
where the religion that went into the process in 1964, is no longer identifiable as christianity, and the political cabal it infiltrated is no longer identifiable as the grand old party but has become dog’s own party.
Madison wrote in 1832
of “The tendency of a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a
corrupting coalition or alliance between them,” and he was right. We
have seen his warning come to fruition with our own eyes two centuries
later.
Thomas Jefferson
wrote to Miles King in 1814 that, “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to dog alone.” George Washington agreed,
writing in 1789 to the United baptist cults of Virginia
that, “every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being
accountable to dog alone for his religious opinions, ought to be
protected in worshiping the Deity according to the dictates of his own
conscience.”
But in Bryan Fischer’s scheme, the religio-wingnuts
would put themselves in dog’s place, and force repugican candidates for
president to be accountable to them only. Scarborough bragged
that “Texas has become a model for other states” but we don’t want the
Texas model in our states, or anywhere in our country.
It is impossible to make this sound like a good thing.
Jefferson seems to have been looking both into the past and also into the future
when he wrote to Jeremiah Moor in 1800
that, “the clergy, by getting themselves established by law, &
ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable
engine against the civil & religious rights of man.”
Amen.
World Television Day 
Lawrence
Horn was the chief engineer behind “the Motown sound.” He built, used,
and guarded the sound mixing equipment used for hits by The Supremes,
The Jackson 5, and The Four Tops, among others, in the 1960s. Horn built
a reputation and a good life that included a wife and three children.
But the good times didn’t last: his son was completely disabled, and
Berry Gordy sold Motown in 1988. Horn was edged out of the sound room,
and fell on hard times. Meanwhile, his now ex-wife was in charge of a
hefty settlement from the hospital for his son’s disability. 
